Sunday Project

Before I tell you all about my Sunday project I am happy to announce that Mozart finally did pooped during our morning walk. He crawled under a pine tree and took care of his business and of course he was about to break down in his happy dance, when I had to put a end to it. I couldn't really blame him for wanting to dance, I was about to break down in a dance myself at this point, but doctors orders are doctors orders.  In addition, while crawling under the tree he completely shredded all that plastic defense I constructed to keep his foot dry so we had to head back home and take care of that foot.

On Sunday after I finished making gazillion of pancakes to feed an army of teenage girls I was starting to have a cabin fever. Here I was sitting on my sofa and twiddling my thumbs. The idea of me having nothing to was so strange that quite frankly it started to make me very irritable.

Just when Husband was about to kick me out of the house I told him that I am going to Home Depot to pick up a few things for my new project. Of course my loving husband said that he will go to the store and pick up all the supplies himself.

What I wanted to build was a wooden box that I can use for working on stays. Normally, I wold just use the PVC pipe for this purpose. However, Mozart is not really respectful of the PVC pipe boundary. I was suspecting that Moz is simply unaware of what his feet are doing on stays and hoping that if I raise him off the ground a bit and if the box is just big enough for him to sit in the correct position but any slight change in that position will make him fall of the box, he might actually notice.

I wanted to build a similar thing for teaching the stand as a tiny shift of his feet on the stand was causing me a great grief, plus I wanted to use it for teaching proper stacking for the breed ring. Now that Moz was on leash walking regiment, I've decided that  this is the best time to work on stays. The "stay" box idea was already cooking in my head when I came across a blog in which the owner of that blog did exactly the same and it seems she was seeing nice results with it.

The list of materials was simple a single 2x2 and 1/4" think MDF board. In addition Husband bought a miter box. Yey. I had been wanting a miter saw since about Christmas, but every time I ask for miter saw, I am told that in order to have all those tools we need to put a shed up in our back yard. Which means way more money than $200 I would spend on the saw, so I guess for now I should be happy with the miter box and I was.

my setup

Miter box is not nearly as exciting as a power tool, but it sure does the job it was designed to do - keeping nice clean cuts at 90 degree angle and even more importantly at 45 degree angle.


During Christmas shopping I came across a book by Ana White that has lots of cool wood working projects for the house. The best part - they were all done by women. I wanted to try my hands in the wood working for a while and the book was a great inspiration and I was about to start my first project!

Things got a little less exciting when I realize that it takes forever to make a single cut and I needed 12! Things turned to be quite frustrating when the time came for 45 degree angle cuts. The saw kept on popping out of the grooves and I figured that it was the person who was handling it. Husband came to the rescue and took over and then I saw that it wasn't the person but the damn saw. The saw was simply too short to use when cutting on an angle. As I was watching my husband struggling with the same things as I was just few min ago, I felt a bit better about my wood working skills. :-)  Husband had even less patience than I, so he turn around and headed back to the store to buy a longer saw.

I figured that I'd keep on working while waiting for the new saw.  The small kiddo came over curious to see what I was doing  and  wanted to help. After working on it she told me that she wants her own tool set - a tiny saw and a tiny hammer!:-)


Husband came back not only with a longer saw but also with a jigsaw. Yippee! A power tool! I used jigsaw to cut the piece out of MDF board.

I wasn't crazy about attempting to put the screws on an angle to fasten the corners together, so to make the screwing job easier on myself I used metal brackets to reinforce the corners. Even that now I had to screw straight down, I still struggled with keeping the screws straight, apparently I will need a lot more practice with the screw driver. On the other hand the jigsaw was very simple and exciting to operate.

Here is the box I had constructed. This is the upside down view of it.
















Here is the Mozzie testing it out. It turned out a tid bit too big, but I think it will work just fine. To prevent Moz from sliding on shiny MDF surface I went over it with a sand paper. Worked perfectly!